"My Dear Children": Gender Variance, Parenthood, and Deborah Sampson's Post-Revolutionary Work

Abstract

Abstract: Departing from the lively scholarly conversation around Deborah Sampson's gender and sexual nonconformity during the period of their enlistment, this article asks the reader to consider the important role that parenting played in Sampson's later life. Such a consideration reveals the complex gendered negotiations, especially regarding biological reproduction, that Sampson attempted both as the subject of Herman Mann's work and a chronicler of their own experience. Attending to later texts, such as an Addrss [sic] Delivered with Applause (1802) and Sampson's own diary of 1802–3 broadens the possibilities for how we can think about historical gender-nonconforming subjects and the difficulties they might have experienced in representing parenthood in public-facing documents in early America. The article argues that Sampson leveraged their gender nonconformity to provide financially for their family in ways typically foreclosed to gender-conforming middle-class women.